The quick hit

This sprawling mock epic about a sleazy penny stock whiz contains scenes of astonishing black-comic brilliance, but it's also solipsistic and exhausting.

Grade: B

Jordan Belfort’s memoir, the source book for Martin Scorsese’s wild new movie (also called “The Wolf of Wall Street”), reminds me of tell-all football memoirs and novels from 40 years ago. It brings no-holds-bared machismo to a closed hothouse environment. In Belfort’s case, it was the “boiler room” of his penny stock investment company, Stratton Oakmont, which became a cesspit of fraudulent business practices and top-down debauchery in the 1990s.

The movie Scorsese has made from the book overflows with unzipped braggadocio, self-exposure that’s at once aggrandizing and incriminating, and drug comedy that does for coke and Quaaludes what “Up in Smoke” did for doobies. (Reportedly, Tommy Chong encouraged Belfort to write the book.) It’s entertaining – and wearying, especially at a near-three hour running time. But whenever you’re about to give up on it, some patch of energizing effrontery, bizarre slapstick or unexpected eloquence keeps pulling you back in.

Belfort himself, played with Brando-like bravura and Jerry Lewis-like elasticity by Leonardo DiCaprio, is the fulcrum of the movie. He narrates with a frankness that’s initially disarming. He tells us that he knew selling stocks was the job for him from the first day he experienced the roar of profanity and the rush of profiteering when he was a “connector” making phone contacts for Wall Street salesmen. He may look like a fresh-faced kid, but the chance to score big money from exploiting low appetites proves irresistible. It’s only a matter of time before his penchant for testosterone-fueled salesmanship takes over his entire life.

The one bump in his path to vainglory is that his first day selling stocks on Wall Street is almost his last day as a broker – Black Monday, October 19, 1987, which marked the biggest percentage drop in Wall Street history. The way the movie tells it, Belfort is ready to work in an electronics store when his first wife suggests that he check out an ad for a Long Island stock company. It turns out to be a strip mall storefront where phone salesmen cold-call clients to sell penny stocks that are worthless except to the salesman, who net 50 percent of each transaction.

The scene in which Belfort uses his Wall Street-generated slick to pull off a mammoth sale sets the stage for Belfort’s emergence as a magnetic guru of the hard sell. He astonishes the déclassé grunts surrounding him, who might as well be hawking Veg-O-Matics. He soon gets the idea that he’d make more money pitching penny stocks to the wealthy than to middle-class or working-class people. Then he realizes that hungry kids aching to make a buck, rather than business school grads gunning to land in a white shoe firm, would be his ideal followers. All they must do is follow his scripts and put them across with the ardor he demands at his adrenaline-pumping pep rallies.

At their best, Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter toy with their antihero’s charisma. They challenge the audience to shake him off when he makes outrageous claims. For example, Belfort declares that the company he founds on Long Island is Ellis Island. It depends on how you interpret the meaning of “the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.”

Calling Belfort the smartest man in the room would be to flatter him. He is the shrewdest as well as the most debauched. The movie’s fascination comes from seeing how far he will degenerate as his cravings define him. One look at the statuesque Naomi (Margot Robbie) and that’s it for his long-suffering spouse, the bright, steadfast Teresa (Cristin Milioti). But he can’t be a one-woman man with Naomi, either. In fact, his one lasting relationship is with his right-hand man and best drug buddy, played cleverly by Jonah Hill as a guy who’s not as sharp as he thinks he is. Long stretches of this film play come off like a ribald coke-and-Quaalude drug comedy.

The most original, upsetting and hilarious sequence depicts Belfort, drugged senseless, striving to get back to his mansion from a country club pay phone before his pal spills incriminating evidence over a tapped line. No filmmaker since Hitchcock has been as skilled as Scorsese at subjective camerawork and cutting – film craft that pulls the audience inside the heart and head of a character. It’s both thrilling and funny to watch him and his virtuoso collaborators, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, use sinuous camera moves and abrupt changes in scale and perspective to chart the vertiginous gap between Belfort’s addled perceptions and reality.

But Scorsese’s choice to limit his perspective almost exclusively to Belfort’s leaves the movie gasping for breath. Near the beginning, Matthew McConaughey, as his mentor, spouts much of the same super-salesman ethos in a riotously mysterious way – in just a couple of scenes, he fully renders a man who uses hedonism to get through a business he despises.

Midway through, Kyle Chandler as a true-blue FBI agent, punctures Belfort’s self-image as a genius by underplaying his own savvy and playing off the rich man’s arrogance. Chandler embodies the kind of American hero Belfort despises: the man who gets satisfaction from performing a job well and with integrity.

The movie could have used more of these two men as well as other characters who could have put the gaudy Belfort into stark relief. He becomes a motivational speaker presenting cutthroat capitalism as the true American way, but we don’t get to know either the people he inspires or the ones he victimizes. At the end, there’s nothing left to him, and to the movie, but hot air.

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